Vigilance for the common good?

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady gives us a foretaste of what’s to come: tyrants and enemies of liberty using as political cover Pope Francis’s intemperate, groundless attack on economic freedom in his new apostolic exhortation. Here’s a snippet:

[Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro] needs to pin it all on the market. Pope Francis seems eager to help. In the document released last week he admonished those who defend “trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” There is no empirical evidence for this, he wrote. It is instead “a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

Millions of the world’s poor and excluded who landed in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries have been witnesses to the polar-opposite conclusion. Immigrants to the pope’s homeland, Argentina, during the same period have not done as well—precisely because they’ve had to plod along in an economy not unlike the one he advocates.

Heavy state intervention was supposed to produce justice for the poor in the breadbasket of South America. We all know how that turned out.

No Christian can doubt the love expressed in the pope’s message, which aims to shepherd the flock away from materialism. But the charge that grinding poverty in the world is the outgrowth of “the absolute autonomy of the marketplace” ignores reality. To be sure, even prosperous economies regulate markets. But those that have a lighter touch do better. Human history clearly demonstrates that when men and women, employing their free will and God-given talents, are able to innovate, produce, accumulate capital and trade even the weakest and most vulnerable are better off.

Instead the pope trusts the state, “charged with vigilance for the common good.” Why is it then that the world’s most desperate poor are concentrated in places where the state has gained an outsize role in the economy specifically on just such grounds?

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8 Responses to “Vigilance for the common good?”

Lately I’ve come to not even trust what our Holy Father has reportedly said or even written. Father Zuhlsdorf in his blog points out a translation error that changed the meaning our the English translation.

Yikes, that document is long. Maybe the economic analysis shows the Pope at his most Argentinian. In 189 he asserts that “…the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property.” But everybody needs some private property–that’s what the poor lack the most.

I wonder if this is an expression of what I think of as a long term disagreement between Catholic tradition and liberalism (liberal in the Lockean sense). I think to Rome private property rights look like a newfangled British invention best kept on the far side of the Channel. It’s the only way I can think to explain his nonsensical economics.

He writes in 188 that we should be “working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor.” Good idea. Unfortunately one of those structural causes of poverty is bad government, which typically follows “…a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding [political] power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing [political] system.” To paraphrase slightly.

By all means we should be skeptical of those with inordinate economic power. And we should be skeptical of those with inordinate political power. I’m trying not to be skeptical of influential clerics writing about economics.

He had some rather harsh things to say about “traditional” Catholics, a category broad enough to cover everyone from sedevacantists to the guy in the next pew who wishes Fr. Smith threw in an Agnus Dei every now and then. Interestingly, I called his comments “nasty” in a thread on facebook and was called a schismatic by a “faithful, orthodox” leader of a national youth ministry organization.

I liked the criticism of secularized pop culture. Wasn’t sure about his comments on popular piety. He seemed to like popular piety in the abstract, but maybe that was intended to approve what he was used to seeing in South America rather than those familiar to us (rosaries, Eucharistic adoration).

In paragraph 70 he notes the decline in Mass attendance in the West and blames everything but crummy catechesis and secularized liturgy that followed from VII. There’s something missing there.

What is one to make of the brew-ha-ha regarding Rush’s comments that this exhortation is “pure Marxism”? Is Rush more or less, correct in his assessment? Or is Father Trigilio correct when he states that Rush has “erroneously extrapolate[d] a false premise” from the Pope’s exhortation? Or does the truth lie somewhere in the middle?

The key to the two rails (the lines of thought of both Fr. Trigillio and Mr. Limbaugh) are found in this statement made by the padre, “Pope Francis did not criticize unfettered capitalism (which if you read the transcript at Rush’s website, Limbaugh did say that); he used the phrase unfettered consumerism.” Fr. Trigillio properly called Rush out for this misstep; by starting with a false wording, you are making a false conclusion.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/365720/agreeing-pope-francis-michael-novak
Michael Novak seems to think a large part of this misunderstanding is simply a poor translation that has cherry-picked and arbitrarily insterted liberal buzz words such as “trickle-down theories,” “invisible hand,” “idolatry of money,” “inequality,” and trust in the state “charged with vigilance for the common good” into the document.